How To Close Your Eyes and Get What You Want

Seeing is believing.

It’s an interesting phrase that is used all the time to justify what’s right in front of our eyes — I can see it. Therefore it must be real.

On the surface, it seems to demonstrate sound reasoning. There’s only one problem: I can think of one hundred times when that statement has fallen far short of the truth.

Two years ago people looked at me and saw a thin individual and believed I was healthy. I assure you I was not.

Five years ago people looked at my successful advertising career and believed I was fulfilled beyond belief because of it.  Nope.

Sometimes people see the company I’ve built and believe that it was easy or natural for me to become an entrepreneur. Not even close.

You can probably think of endless examples in your own life too — an acquaintance’s marriage that appears perfect from the outside but is held together with duct tape on the inside or a new job that looks like all you’ve ever wanted but turns out to be anything but that.

Seeing is not always believing. In fact, it’s often an optical delusion.

Instead of seeing an end result (a couple walking through the park together) and backpedaling into a belief (their marriage is perfect, and they’ve never argued a day in their life), I prefer to reverse the scenario.

When it comes to any ambition in my life, I trust that I’ll see it once I believe it.

In my experience, it works like a charm — the more I believe something is possible, the more likely I will see it come to life in the near future.

When I first became the Richmond Christmas Mother, I believed with all of my heart that the VCU school of fashion and design would be willing to make couture dresses for me to wear to the many events I had to attend. Check.

When considering a career as an entrepreneur, I had no idea how to do it, but I believed I could figure it out. And indeed, I did.

When my husband, Richard, and I were dating while living 5,000 miles apart, I believed we could make it through and that the short time apart would be worth a lifetime of being together. Checkmate.

Believing is seeing.  See?

In each of those scenarios I could have taken a pessimistic approach, “they’ll never say yes, I’ll never figure this out, we’ll never make it through this”.  But that’s not the road I chose.

I chose to believe.

I closed my eyes, pictured my ideal scenario and then lived my life from that place. Eyes wide shut.

Once I believed that those ambitions were indeed possible, I had the wind in my sails that I needed to see them to fruition. And low and behold they all eventually happened — just like I envisioned that they would.

Now, I’m not talking about crazy pipe dreams and living in la la land. I’m talking about seeing the end game, believing that you can get there, and operating your daily life as if you’re well on your way to making each and every one happen.

You see what you believe.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “We become what we think about all day long.”  If that’s true, and I believe that it is, why not choose the positive path? If you think something is possible, there’s no reason you can’t make it happen with a little hard work and a lot of perseverance.

Making the shift away from seeing and then believing to believing and then seeing opens a world of possibilities.

If what we eventually see in our lives is evidence of what we believe, then what do you believe is possible?

Start there. Start every single day there.